Dissidia: Final Fantasy is an action RPG on a portable system that's jam-packed with the kind of features you would expect in a Final Fantasy game on a non-portable system.

The heart of the game is a fighting game set in expansive, full 3D environments. The combat system itself is more in depth than your typical button masher and is somewhat overwhelming at first. The game also lets you take full advantage of the 3D environments by, among other things, running up walls, sliding around on rails, and fighting in the air a la the final battle between Cloud and Sephiroth in Advent Children (though you can't actually fly).

There is a story mode where you play the main characters from FF I - X on their quests to save the world from the ultimate evil, blah blah blah. There are also a number of other non-Story related Battle modes that let you fight against a CPU-opponent or another person in ad hoc mode.

The RPG/character customization aspects are as deep as you would find in a regular main line FF game and there's a seemingly endless amount of "stuff" you can unlock and/or purchase/acquire. In fact the game is basically designed to encourage you to keep battling over and over and over again. Leveling up all the characters to unlock all their moves and abilities would take hundreds of hours by my estimate (22 characters * ~30 hours per = ~660 hours).

One thing that might keep the game from sucking all your life away is that the characters on the "good" side are (with one exception) the androgynous / foppishly dressed / morose / taciturn (pick two), male main characters from FF I - X. The "evil" characters are somewhat more diverse but there might only be a handful of characters you'll like enough to level up beyond what you need to complete the Story mode, which you need to do to unlock various things.

The combat is fun and rewards considered play rather than just button mashing though there is an element of "luck" at times where the tide of battle can rapidly swing from one side to the other which can be frustrating when you lose to that sort of thing but exciting when you win. The few characters I've tried out so far all have their own style of play so there's definitely a lot of replayability as long as you can stand the characters themselves. There's a demo of the combat system on PSN (79 MB) for those that want to try it out before buying the game.

-

Rating: Buy it, though be warned this game could become a huge time sink